A Rumor of War

by Philip Caputo

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
20th-anniversary edition of Caputo's memoir of fighting in Vietnam.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
“To call it the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it . . . A Rumor of War is a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist—and the insistence is all the more powerful because it is implicit—that the reader ask himself these questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive? The sense of self is assaulted, overcome, subverted, leaving the reader to contemplate the deadening possibility that his own moral safety net might have a hole in it. It is a terrifying thought, and A Rumor of War is a terrifying book.”—John Gregory Dunne, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Caputo’s troubled, searching meditations on the love and hate of war, on fear, and the ambivalent discord warfare can create in the hearts of decent men, are among the most eloquent I have read in modern literature.”—William Styron, The New York Review of Books

“Every war seems to find its own voice: Caputo . . . is an eloquent spokesman for all we lost in Vietnam.”—C. D. B. Bryan, Saturday Review

“A book that must be read and reread—if for no other reason than as an eloquent statement against war. It is a superb book.”—Terry Anderson, Denver Post

“This is news that goes beyond what the journalists brought us, news from the heart of darkness. It was long overdue.”—Newsweek

“Not since Siegfried Sassoon's classic of World War I, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, has there been a war memoir so obviously true, and so disturbingly honest.”—William Broyles, Texas Monthly

the troubled conscience of America speaking passionately, truthfully, finally. -- The New York Times Book Review, Theodore Solotaroff

Customer Reviews

By Harold Y. Grooms

For anyone who has ever asked, "What was Vietnam really like," Marine Lieutenant Philip Caputo's book, "A Rumor of War," is a must read. In this autobiographical account of his time as an infantry officer in, "the `Nam," he describes the experience in authoritative terms enhanced by collegiate English studies and time spent as a combat journalist. The result is the most well written account of life in an infantry platoon in Vietnam that I have ever read.

Phil Caputo could have been virtually anyone in America in the early `60's. A young, idealistic, all-American boy who joined the Marines in search of adventure, and out of a patriotic desire to answer John Kennedy's challenge to, "Ask not what your country can do for you. . ." He and his platoon marched off to war to find glory and honor. What they found was, "death, death, death."

Caputo takes you into the muddy foxhole with him, making you feel the heat and annoyance of the ever-present insects, and the sniper shots that all united to deprive you of the precious commodity of sleep. He takes you on patrol with them down, "Purple Heart Trail," where the main enemies were the heat, the insects, and endless mines and booby traps. The reader can feel the rage of the infantrymen who fought endless battles with an enemy that was everywhere, yet nowhere. Gradually enthusiasm turned to pessimism; pessimism to despair; and despair to rage; rage that ultimately vented itself in mindless violence against anything Vietnamese. They were then left with the heat, the insects, and guilt borne of actions taken that they would never have dreamed of a few short months before.

Caputo and his enthusiastic, young, Marines could have been anyone who has ever fought: the patriots at Lexington and Concord, who later found themselves half starved and freezing at Valley Forge; or any number of Union or Confederate soldiers from Bull Run to Appomattox. They could have been "Doughboys" who went, "Over There," to "Make the World Safe for Democracy," only to find themselves "fighting" immersion foot and mustard gas in the trenches of France; or perhaps even soldiers serving under, "Ol' Blood and Guts" himself, George S. Patton; "Our blood, his guts," as the GI's said. Their stories all verify Gen. Robert E. Lee's famous quote: "War seldom avails anything to those unfortunate enough to have to fight it."

A Rumor of War ranks up there with Gen. Harold Moore's, "We Were Soldiers Once and Young," and Col. David Hackworth's, "About Face." All three show how debates that raged in Washington, Paris, Saigon, and Hanoi were ultimately scored. Whether you were a "hawk or a dove," a liberal or a conservative, a professor or student, you will benefit from reading this book that answers the question authoritatively: "Hey! What was Vietnam really like?"

THE POLITICS of RAGE

by Thomas Bevilacqua

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Rage. What do I know of rage? I know rage. I am in a constant state of rage. Like a man swimming upstream, treading water every waking moment of my life. Of rage I know. I am outraged, and if you're not, then you haven't been paying attention. I am outraged at the world and in the evening of my days, I grow less tolerant of ignorance and stupidity. I have rage for the Liberal "Left" of the Democratic party; the A.C.L.U., the Hollywood "elite," the United Nations. I have rage for the European attitudes toward the United States of America and our crusading fundamentalist Muslims that try to kill us. I have rage for the 9th District Court of Appeals, as well. I am outraged because never before in history has the world needed the United States of America more, and never before has a country been so misunderstood. I know Rage. Believe me to be ever so sincerely yours,Thomas Drinkwater - Author

About the Author
My name is Thomas Drinkwater. I am a citizen of the United States of America. I abide by the law, I pay taxes, I vote Republican. I believe in God, I support my President, Mr. George W. Bush; his Administration; our troops; the 'Coalition;' the war in Iraq. I will stop anyone who tries to prevent me from doing so. I have received the benefits of a formal education, I have studied American politics and I am a seeker of wisdom and truth. I am loquacious and fluid, and have educated myself through both the proper sources and have read all the scholars that my 65 years have allowed me. I have a supreme desire to serve my country. I am too old to fight, and have not been fortunate enough yet to be a part of our great American History. Now, in the evening of my days, I am consumed with doing something noteworthy, to be able to take part and fulfill my destiny before I do die. Believe me to be ever so sincerely yours,Thomas Drinkwater - AuthorRedlands, California

Customer Reviews

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Vietnam: A History

by Stanley Karnow

Editorial Reviews

By Mike Powers

"Vietnam: A History" is a masterfully written history of America's involvement in Vietnam - certainly one of the two best single-volume histories (along with "A Bright Shining Lie," by Neil Sheehan) of America's most regrettable war that I've read. Written by Stanley Karnow, a former Southeast Asian correspondent for "Time" and "Life" magazines, and "The Washington Post," this book is a comprehensive and fascinating look at the Vietnam war, from its underlying causes at the end of World War II, to the final takeover of South Vietnam by its Communist neighbor, North Vietnam, in April 1975.

Karnow delivers with crisp and precise prose an account of the Vietnam War which is both fair and objective. He analyzes the conflict from both the political and military standpoint, and is unsparing in his criticism of errors made by political and military leaders on all sides of the conflict. Three areas of this book were especially interesting to me: first, the author's account of the conflict between the French and Viet Minh, and how the French were defeated at Dienbienphu in 1954; second, how the U.S. government formulated its Vietnam policy under the Kennedy administration, and how that policy ultimately failed; and third, how Richard Nixon, upon becoming President in 1969, changed America's Vietnam policy and began the process of "Vietnamizing" the war. (Karnow's candid description of how the Kennedy administration initially supported South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, then tacitly approved of the 1963 coup d'etat which resulted in Diem's murder is fascinating.)

"Vietnam: A History" is an essential book for the reader interested in gaining a good understanding of the war and its causes. Highly recommendable reading!

The Cold War: A New History

by John Lewis Gaddis

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Gregory and Sklar, reading Yale history professor Gaddis's study of the American-Soviet standoff, give voice to their inner television announcer, their twin brands of masculine sonorousness verging on virile parody before settling comfortably on the side of familiar voice-over solidity. Gaddis's work unravels the tangled threads of the Cold War, from the tense Allied conferences at the end of WWII to the Korean War and onward, and his book's readers give it the sensation of every word being carefully cultivated and primped before being spoken. If this leads to some of the immediacy, the heart-in-throat sensation, of the events described being diluted, so be it, for Gregory and Sklar give Gaddis's book the grandeur its subject matter so richly deserves. Sounding more professorial, in the I-play-an-Ivy-League-professor-on-television sort of way, than the good professor himself, Gregory and Sklar do an admirable job of making Gaddis's learned words their own.

From The Washington Post
When China's People's Liberation Army suddenly crossed the Yalu River during the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered atomic weapons to be dropped on the Chinese troops. The Soviet Union responded with nuclear attacks on the South Korean cities of Pusan and Inchon. The Americans countered by wiping out Vladivostok and two Chinese cities; the Soviets, in turn, bombed Frankfurt and Hamburg.

All of the above is sheer fiction, of course; no country has used nuclear weapons in wartime since the United States destroyed Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. But in a couple of horrific paragraphs in John Lewis Gaddis's new book, The Cold War, this scenario is presented in straightforward fashion within the otherwise factual narrative, until eventually the author acknowledges the put-on.

This is Gaddis's unconventional way of making an important point: The Cold War was historically significant as much for what didn't happen as for what did. Terrifying though the great global showdown sometimes was, the United States and the Soviet Union never waged a full-scale war. "Prior to 1945, great powers fought great wars so frequently that they seemed to be permanent features of the international landscape," Gaddis notes. But nuclear weapons meant that "for the first time in history no one could be sure of winning, or even surviving, a great war." And so the hot wars the superpowers and their proxies fought -- such as Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan -- were limited in scope.

Gaddis, who teaches history at Yale University, is America's most prominent Cold War historian. He first emerged 34 years ago as a leader of the "post-revisionist" school of Cold War history. The earliest group of historians writing about the Cold War had blamed its origins largely on Joseph Stalin's desire for Soviet domination of Europe. In the late 1950s and '60s, a revisionist school, led by William Appleman Williams of the University of Wisconsin, argued that the Cold War was primarily an outgrowth of American economic interests, which led Moscow to react defensively to potential U.S. encroachment in its backyard.

Enter Gaddis. Rejecting both contentions, his 1972 book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, portrayed the origins of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union less as the lone fault of one side or the other and more as the result of a plethora of conflicting interests and misperceptions between the two superpowers, propelled by domestic politics and bureaucratic inertia. Gaddis has explored the Cold War in six other books since then, and, in the process, his views have evolved -- most notably in We Now Know (1997), which was rooted in newly opened Soviet archives. Particularly after the Soviet collapse, he has stressed the significance of democratic values and America's ability to deal with its allies in a profoundly more decent fashion than the Soviet Union treated Eastern Europe. In effect, Gaddis has swung back nearly to where the early Cold War historians started by putting the onus of blame on Stalin and the brutal nature of his regime.

Gaddis's latest book boils down the history of the entire Cold War to a sometimes brilliant 266 pages of text, in trenchant, lucid prose intended not for historians and specialists but for ordinary readers. He has not done much new archival field work to produce this new synthesis, and, at times, he relies heavily on his previous work. Yet to Gaddis's credit, he does not merely rewrite himself or retrace the main events from 1946 to 1991. Instead, he stretches to find new ways (like his startling Korean counterfactual above) to cover the subject, stepping back and looking at the entire period with distance and perspective.

Gaddis opens The Cold War, for example, not in Moscow, Washington or Eastern Europe but on an island off the coast of Scotland, where a sickly, depressed English writer named Eric Blair, writing under the pen name of George Orwell, sat down to write his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the classic portrait of a world of totalitarianism. "It is worth starting with visions . . . because they establish hopes and fears," Gaddis explains. "History then determines which prevail." In the closing pages, he concludes that the Cold War "began with a return of fear and ended in a triumph of hope, an unusual trajectory for great historical upheavals."

Gaddis's efforts at imaginative writing are not always successful. The fictitious passage on the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War, for example, is so out of character with the rest of the book that it leaves the stunned reader wondering what on earth is going on. His concluding chapter mystifyingly diverts into a dissertation on how the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage shows the hazards of historical judgment.

Gaddis is also clearly much better at writing about the early Cold War, from the 1940s through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, than at dealing with later periods. When he covers the origins of the U.S.-Soviet conflict, his narrative is full of confident, trenchant analysis. Examining how the United States in the 1950s rejected the idea of limited nuclear war, for example, he calls Dwight D. Eisenhower "the most subtle and brutal strategist of the nuclear age. . . . [He] insisted on planning only for total war. His purpose was to make sure that no war at all would take place."

When Gaddis gets to the late 1960s and '70s, by contrast, he offers fewer insights and seems to be hurrying to cover everything. He bogs down in the details of events such as the late-1970s conflict between Somalia and Ethiopia, even though he later acknowledges it didn't affect the larger picture of the Cold War. His way of introducing the revolts against established authority in places like the United States and France in the late 1960s is to describe how China's Mao Zedong once complained that the young, rampaging Chinese Red Guards wouldn't listen to him -- a bizarre example, since, as Gaddis later admits, it was Mao who had goaded the Red Guards to rebel in the first place.

Gaddis places particular stress on the role of ideology, notably the failures of Marxism-Leninism to predict how people and countries would behave. Class struggle didn't emerge in the way that the communists' theorists had anticipated, and, to Stalin's surprise, the major Western powers cooperated with one another for decades rather than going to war over economic issues. "This is where the capitalists got it right: they were better than the communists at learning from history, because they never bought into any single, sacrosanct, and therefore unchallengeable theory of history," Gaddis concludes.

The main heroes of his story are those who challenged the Soviet regime in the realm of ideas and values, such as Orwell, Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel and Pope John Paul II. On questions of grand strategy, Gaddis gives great weight to George F. Kennan (who died last year at the age of 101), the brilliant American diplomat who wrote the famous "long telegram" of 1946 and the anonymous 1947 "X" article in Foreign Affairs magazine, which together explained the sources of Soviet behavior and laid the foundations for the American policy of containment. (Gaddis, who is writing Kennan's biography, dedicates The Cold War to him.)

Gaddis is markedly less enthusiastic about Western leaders who sought a working accommodation with Soviet communism without challenging its legitimacy. For instance, he carefully explores the strategic thinking of Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, giving credit (too much credit, in fact) to some of their secret, balance-of-power diplomacy. But he then concludes that their push for détente with Moscow reflected "a kind of moral anesthesia. . . . In its search for geopolitical stability, the Nixon administration had begun to support domestic stability inside the U.S.S.R." -- thus spurning dissidents and prophets like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.

Such challengers got their way in the end, though. The Cold War resulted in the discrediting of dictatorships around the world and "the globalization of democracy," Gaddis writes. "Promoting democracy became the most visible way that the Americans and their Western European allies could differentiate themselves from their Marxist-Leninist rivals."

Because of these views, Gaddis has become a favorite historian of the George W. Bush administration, which, of course, is now seeking to promote democracy in the Middle East. A year ago, Gaddis was called to the White House to offer his ideas before Bush delivered his second inaugural, which gave ever-greater stress to the importance of democracy.

In his other writings, Gaddis has become a qualified supporter of the Bush administration's strategy in combating terrorism. While criticizing the administration's unilateralism in Bush's first term, he has given credit to the idea of preemptive or even preventive warfare, arguing that the Sept. 11 attacks showed that Washington required a new strategy for a new era. "That event revealed a category of threats so difficult to detect and yet so devastating if carried out that the United States had little choice but to use pre-emptive means to prevent their emergence," he wrote in Foreign Affairs a year ago.

And yet Gaddis's conclusions in his new book call into question other aspects of the current administration's thinking. Several of the administration's leading officials, starting with Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, started their careers and developed their ideas during the Cold War. They have emphasized, above all, the importance of American military power. But Gaddis draws the opposite lesson. "The Cold War may well be remembered, then, as the point at which military strength, a defining characteristic of 'power' itself for the past five centuries, ceased to be that," he argues. "The Soviet Union collapsed, after all, with its military forces, even its nuclear capabilities, fully intact." Those are words worth keeping in mind as America, the surviving superpower, deals with the world in the aftermath of the Cold War. Without ideals, the missiles won't matter.

Costumer Reviews

By Odysseus "A Traveller"

I bought this book with the expectation that it would provide a comprehensive overview of the events, episodes, personalities, motivations, and results of the Cold War. A reader looking for something similar might be disappointed. This book does not really attempt to be a comprehensive history of the Cold War, but is rather a collection of chapters, each devoted to a particular thematic aspect of the war. It reads as though Gaddis has a particular thesis about the Cold War that he wants to flesh out in each chapter, rather than telling the whole story in an orderly narrative.

As examples: there is a chapter about the "logic" of Mutual Assured Destruction, and how mankind's survival depended on two superpowers maneuvering their way through that system's pitfalls. There is another chapter contrasting the Leninist vision of authoritarianism with the Wilsonian vision of self-determination. There is a chapter about how the superpowers' respective allies eventually refused to do their bidding. There is a chapter about the moral paradoxes at the heart of American Cold War international policy. There is another about the key individual actors who forced the Cold War to a successful resolution. And there is one, sort of a "people power" chapter, about how the Cold War ended (Gaddis argues) largely because the internal contradictions of communism, the gap between its promises and its reality, would no longer be tolerated by its subjects.

I found many of these chapters to be thought-provoking, and often found them persuasive. At first, I resisted Gaddis's thesis about the spillover of amorality from the international sphere to the American domestic sphere, and how this precipitated the fall of Richard Nixon. It seemed a weak thesis to me at first, but upon reflection, I agree with Gaddis that there was a fundamental discomfort, a paradox, in how America waged the Cold War. We cozied up to various dictators who violated American values re individual rights, so long as they sided with us in the conflict. And we countenanced actions abroad that we would not have at home. Eventually, Gaddis argues, the roof fell in on those contradictions, when President Nixon started to practice the sort of statecraft domestically that had previously only been tolerated internationally. Gaddis seems to suggest that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened, that this inconsistency was unsustainable.

In other places, though, I found Gaddis to be less convincing. Certainly the demonstrations of "people power" that brought down the communist regimes were courageous and consequential. But it is equally true that it could have come out quite differently, if a Stalin had still been in power. Gaddis argues that the people in the communist regimes had finally come to fully appreciate the vast gulf between communism's promises and its reality, and while that is no doubt true, many a similarly-cognizant subject of these regimes was crushed by them in earlier decades. Many other factors coalesced to bring down the governments behind the Iron Curtain, including the steady economic and military pressure brought to bear by a more prosperous west.

Perhaps the best chapter in the Gaddis book is the one that is devoted to "actors" -- the singular figures whose insights and vision succeeded in changing the world. Gaddis is clearly an admirer of John Paul II, and he also credits Ronald Reagan with a lofty vision beyond what most other statesmen of his time could see. Reagan, according to Gaddis, was critical to ending the uneasy, dangerous "peace" of Mutual Assured Destruction.

Another of Gaddis's finer chapters is one wherein he details the events in Hungary and East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Gaddis presents more details and insights than I have found in other histories of those wondrous events of 1989.

Some of Gaddis's pronouncements struck me as simply curious. He states in one chapter that never so much misery and suffering has been borne from good intentions as under the communist regimes. Whose good intentions, I wondered? Stalin? Lenin? Marx? Mao? It really stretches the definition of "good intentions" to ascribe such to the architects of 20th century authoritarian communism. By this malleable definition, most any dictator could be said to have "good intentions."

Gaddis also provides a much loftier portrait of Woodrow Wilson than I believe most historians would share. Gaddis indicates that Wilson is highly respected today, but I would suggest that at least as many historians regard Wilson as an impractical romantic, in the arena of international relations.

I would recommend Gaddis's book as a second or third book on the Cold War, but not the first source. It is not the best source as to the "what," though Gaddis's pronouncements on "why" are often convincing.

In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History (Revised)

by David P. Chandler

Costumer Reviews

If you are interested in history, or perhaps if you just had to sit through history way back when, you probably heard about "no taxation without representation", Gettysburg, Disraeli, the Magna Carta, Charlemagne, Voltaire, and Cheops' Pyramid, to take a few out of the grab bag. Whether or not you've heard of similarly central and basic events or people in Southeast Asia is another question. Most people in English-speaking countries are a bit vague if asked about Arakan (a long independent kingdom now part of Burma or Myanmar) or Cebuano (one of the most important Philippine languages), Tu Duc (the last major emperor of Vietnam who died in 1883) or Kartini (a Javanese woman whose letters are a monument to modernization and change in Indonesia). I first used the 1973 edition of this book more than 30 years ago when I had to teach an introductory course on Southeast Asia. I found it an invaluable source of information, in an excellently organized format. The authors wisely did not try to cover two thousand years or more of history for the eleven countries-Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, East Timor, Brunei, and the Philippines-making up the region. They begin with an excellent picture of the 18th century world, including fishermen and rice farmers, religion, trade, local rulers and colonial rulers (at that time, only the Spanish in part of the Philippines). This section alone is worth the price of the book as a marvelous integrated history. The next section deals with the way each major society dealt with the impinging outside world, which arrived in the shape of colonial economic and political encroachments and ultimate control. Each colonial power adopted particular measures, producing differing reactions from the inevitable nationalist movements. Meanwhile Chinese and Indian businessmen, then Japanese military occupation added new elements to the historical mix. People who want up-to-date material must look for the later edition. My edition of IN SEARCH OF SOUTHEAST ASIA does not discuss much after 1960, leaving out the Second Indochina War, the economic transformation of Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia since then, the impact of oil in Indonesia, and the Cambodian genocide. But in any case, as an introduction to Southeast Asia, as a background work for the study of any one of the countries mentioned, this book would be hard to beat. It contains some excellent maps and detailed information on a myriad subjects. Its style is serious, but not unreadable. If you read the whole thing, you will know more about Southeast Asia than 99% of Westerners. And that's a shame.

Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War: Documents and Essays (Major Problems in American History)

by Robert McMahon and Thomas Paterson

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the Major Problems in American History series introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. history. Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War incorporates new research expands its coverage of the experiences of average soldiers.

About the Author
Robert J. McMahon received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1977 and was professor of History at the University of Florida before moving to Ohio State University. He specializes in United States diplomatic history. He is the author of Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence (1981) and The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (1994). He is also the co-editor of the Problems in American Civilization book The Origins of the Cold War, which entered its fourth edition in 1999.

Thomas Paterson is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968. In addition to being the General Editor of Houghton Mifflin's Major Problems series, he is co-author of Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 5/e, (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) and A People and A Nation, 6/e (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). In addition to authoring several books and editing collections of essays on the history of U.S. Foreign Relations, he served as senior editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of American Foreign Relations (1997). He is part president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Customer Reviews

By William Byrd

This review is from: Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War: Documents and Essays (Major Problems in American History Series) (Paperback)
As the book title and "a reader" suggests this is a book with tons and tons of essays on the Vietnam War. These essays cover just about everything that was political or social or anything else about the war. It has topics on Kennedy, Johnson, Eisenhower, Nixon, My Lai, The Tet Offensive, discrimination, the domestic homefront, etc. This book provided a great wealth of sources for a research paper that I had to do. However, unless you are really into the Vietnam War, or that era, this book may be a little dry some times. It does provide a lot of good information, such as facts and figures, but it is just a bunch of peoples, the scholars who wrote the essays, opinions; as well as some Vietnam Vets accounts of the war itself, coming home, etc.

I am giving it four out of five because of the dryness that sometimes occurs. Yet, it does remain a really good source for material, if one has to do research or just has general curiosity. Of course, by the end of the book, the reader will begin to see the lessons learned from Vietnam.

By Christoph P. O'connell

This review is from: Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War: Documents and Essays (Major Problems in American History Series) (Paperback)
This book has a lot of good information in it. Through the essays you gain a deep understanding of some of the events that influenced the course of the war that other books cover only slightly or omit all together.

There are a couple HORRIBLE essays that seem to drag for a long long time. Each chapter concludes with 2 essays that either have differing points of view or cover different aspects of the chapter in more detail.

The blessing of this book is that it has a lot of information that comes directly from the Vietnamese, including some translations of South Vietnamese army members as they consider their defeat and flee Saigon after the North takes it over.

Over all, I like this book. At least one of the essays in the very beginning is bad enough that I almost put the book down and didn't pick it back up, but once you get past that, you are in for a good read!

Vietnam War Memorial "3 Soldiers" Bookmark

by Magnetic Bookmark

Product Description

Vietnam War Memorial "3 Soldiers" Bookmark

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